February 5th, 1981: My Pictures of Kinky Things

By Royston Tester

(for Kevin Koenigs 1950-2014)

Hoo stepped from an alcove at the side of the swimming-pool and let his white towel fall. Slender, naked, twenty-six years old, he was new to Canada, to graduate school, and to the “Track Two” district of Toronto where downtown hustlers met their johns.

Hoo became aware of—and trusted that the camera did not catch it—a small crowd gathering beyond the crew and Director Harry Sutherland, in the cramped lobby of the baths. Hoo jumped, far too self-consciously, into the water.

When he reached the other side, an assistant grinned and held out a towel. “Let’s do it again,” said Harry, from the shallow end. “Don’t worry about them.”

He indicated the antsy spectators beyond the glass, gathering to watch this dramatization of the February 5th, 1981, bathhouse raids. There were more people coming in. “Enough is Enough” was not only the documentary’s title: this was a community in uproar. Hoo’s mind drifted from the task. His college supervisor had demanded a study-proposal by Monday on L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between. Hoo had been obsessed by the narrator, Leo Colston, both an 11-year-old boy and an elderly man, who in 1900 visited an English country house and, unbeknownst to him as his 11-year-old self, lusted after an earthy gamekeeper called Ted. The book, right now in his hand, was a gay Lady Chatterley’s Lover, really. If you read the subtext. Between filming sessions, Hoo had been deep in subtext all morning. Ted the farmer and Trimingham the viscount were after Lady Marian of Brandham Hall. Leo carried messages.

Hoo re-positioned himself in the alcove. Filming was taking hours. Awaiting the next shot, he read a few more lines about young Leo’s first meeting with Lord Trimingham.

“Overcome by curiosity I stared at his odd face, at the scar, the down-weeping, blank eye, the upturned mouth, as if they could tell me something.”

“Take Two,” Harry said.

In the lobby, faces pressed against the glass. The main doors were open to the street. Hoo did the best he could; a plunge is only a plunge after all. The same assistant met him on the other side.

“Fine,” said Harry, surprised. “Thank you.”

Upstairs in the cubicle where, only days before, men had rested and made love, Hoo found his clothes and reached for the boxers. With a bit of luck, he would be home by dinner-time and could finish The Go-Between proposal.

Then I brought out a phrase I had been pondering over. ‘You are a guest in your own house!’

He smiled. ‘And very pleased to be,’ he said, a little crisply.”

Hoo noticed blood in the dented drywall beside the bunk. He looked again at the door, crowbarred and kicked into a hopeless shape by the police force of Operation Soap. Splinters and shards lay everywhere. He pulled on his jeans and sat down.

Near his feet, a hinge had sprouted screws. He went downstairs to the lobby.

One of the “found-in” crowd, newly released from custody, was telling a story of the cops’ behavior during the raid.

“When I asked them why they wanted to photograph me nude, they said, ‘We’re strange people. We like pictures of kinky things.’”

“Was that the officer they called ‘The Animal’?”

“Biggest fucking mistake of my life,” said a man with a wedding ring who was from out of town—and looked as though mistakes were his forté.

Hoo thought he would stay around. Join, more fully, with hundreds of others, in the escalating push-back to Operation Soap.

“One cop said, in the shower room while we were lined up against the wall, ‘I wish these pipes were hooked up to gas so I could annihilate you all.’”

“Hoo, Hoo!”

The Go-Between could wait.

Arms

The Marine stood erect, shoulders back.

Mute.

In the packed courtroom at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, on February 5th, 1981, he gazed at nothing and everything. Like no other returnee, this thin-haired, 34-year-old could stare duty down and survive. People called him “White Cong.” During his fourteen years of communist detention in Vietnam, he had overcome all odds, except perhaps brainwashing, and had made it home to America—and the embrace of a court martial.

“Private First Class Robert R. Garwood,” said an official, “it is my duty as president of this court to inform you that this court in closed session and upon secret written ballot, two thirds of the members present at the time this vote was taken, concurring in each finding of guilty, finds you guilty of the specification of Charge 3.”

The charge of collaboration specified that as a prisoner of war Garwood had joined the enemy forces, worn their uniform, carried the enemy’s weapon, and acted as an interpreter for the Vietcong. He was an informer, indoctrinator, and guard. The jury of five Marine Corps officers deliberated for two days.

In a courtroom seat, Bobby’s girlfriend wept.

In Da Nang in 1965, Bobby, as a motor-pool driver, had lost his way while returning to base. Shot in the arm by guerillas, who wasted little time in celebrating their American nineteen-year-old catch, he was stripped to his skivvies and tied to a bamboo pole.

Expecting to be executed at any moment, he was paraded through several villages. At every stop, young and old threw stones and jabbed sticks into him until he squealed. Within three days, his untreated wounds festering, he was placed in a bamboo cage. After an unsuccessful escape, and with amoebic dysentery, he was thrown into a seven-foot hole. Gradually, it filled with excrement.

Undeterred by Bobby’s resilience, the camp interrogators invited him to meet two condemned prisoners of war, from South Vietnam, who were forced to play Russian roulette in front of him. From that moment on, Bobby vowed to live every day—simply to get to the next one. Eventually, the war would end.

Tutored by another POW, Green Beret Captain Ike Eisenbraun, Bobby learned how to eat insects, wild herbs, roots, and rats. Bobby had an ear for languages and, with Ike’s expert instruction in Vietnamese, he very quickly acquired his captors’ lingo. Bobby tried, without much luck, to convince other American detainees to share his newfound diet. More than a dozen POWs died while in the camp. They refused to believe that eating rodents would keep them alive.

Three years later, the camp was bombed by U.S. B-52s. Bobby was blind for six months and deaf for a year. After the Tet offensive in 1969, he did get a chance to flee but was recaptured. While the U.S. government deliberated over the arrangements for his release, Bobby was subjected to 20 days of intense electric shocks. His captors wished to “fry his memory.”

Still at attention in the Camp Lejeune hearing, Private First Class Robert R. Garwood realized that the president of the court had finished speaking. Bobby looked to his defense attorney, John Lowe, for the cue.

He felt someone grip his elbow.

In just over a decade, Bobby’s experiences would inspire amongst other things, a movie and the depiction of a personality type, “Forrest Gump.” Today, though, February 5, 1981, Bobby looked straight ahead as he was marched from the courtroom. It was his “fugue” stare. Silent, wary, of many parts. A gaze of kissing the boys goodbye. The local newspapers called it “no visible emotion.” John Lowe named it “disappointed.”

But Bobby was comfortable in the arms of anyone but himself; no expression required. Arms would always get him out, he knew that.

Wars do end.

He knew that too.

Milking Techniques

When Maggie Smith walks on-stage at the Haymarket Theatre in London, for the 8pm show of Virginia, she is greeted with applause. The reception—she herself would never term it an assault—was largely what Edna O’Brien’s play was about: performance and, to a far lesser degree, its observers. Wrapped up in the dynamic through this particular drama was the lesbianism, stream of consciousness, madness, and suicide by drowning of Virginia Woolf, a woman besieged by the torrent of words, impressions, and sensations that, minute by minute, tormented her. And through which Virginia sought a path in life by writing. Some sanity. Repose. So often eluding her as she tried to compose a sentence.

As Maggie wanders the austere set, designed to suggest the landscape of Virginia Woolf ’s mind, she weaves in and out of gauzy scrims that, at the start, depict three trees imprisoned in cages. As the play unfolds, they depict country meadows, Bloomsbury terraces, a river, the appearance and disappearance of figures human and spectral. The sound of gurgling opens and closes the show. Intimations of Virginia’s watery death and, too, a suggestion of the galloping words and sensations with which she wrestled.

Through these opening moments, Maggie carries with her the experience of a world premiere, conducted in Stratford, Ontario, the previous year. Still under the direction of Robin Phillips, and with the stage design of Phillip Silver, she is in good hands. Although the critics in Canada and in England have not always been kind. They have struggled, as does Maggie, and as did Virginia Woolf and Edna O’Brien with the nature of duende in artistic work. The word has no real equivalent in English. But it approximates “dark or mysterious power” that artist and audience alike can feel in a performance. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes not. Maggie does not trouble herself with duende this evening. She is launched into Virginia Woolf and a night of memorable, even startling, theatre.

Maggie brings to bear her trademark comic timing, her ear for dry, upper-class wit, her capacity for a quadruple take, the dithering voice, mimicry, clenched fists slammed, into knitted-cardigan pockets. The show is a one-woman tour de force. Its highlight stands, inconspicuously at first, in the lines she delivers about milking techniques at her lover Vita Sackville-West’s estate. It’s as though Maggie-Virginia is listening to herself as she speaks. It sounds so authentically like a tongue-in-flurry trying to keep up with racing thoughts. Maggie-Virginia’s efforts to contain the brimfulness are almost too unbearable to hear.

Maggie carries off the moment with aplomb. Some will call her performance “middlebrow” for its refusal to submit to the power of Virginia Woolf ’s, or even Edna O’Brien’s words, to let them breathe. Others will call it Maggie Smith’s reluctance, à la Woolf, to “drown.” Yet Maggie, Virginia Woolf, and Edna O’Brien are, collectively, lending voice to the precariousness of witness and expression.

On February 5th, 1981, did Maggie Smith impersonate or vandalize Virginia Woolf through her performance in Virginia? Did duende emerge from the Haymarket Theatre and from Maggie Smith’s lips? Why was there an audience at all? At the core of Virginia Woolf ’s life was a dreaded emptiness that she filled with words in a diary. But who filled whom?

Observers had to know.

At the gladiatorial ringside tonight, Maggie Smith stands before her audience. Virginia Woolf ’s technique was to take moments and split them into a kaleidoscope of sensations as she angled for something essential. She was obsessed with that quest. In her, as in Maggie this evening, there is only ever the play. Baying for blood.

It’s the only thing. In a foreign country.

Nudge, Nudge

“Everywhere I go, I am Trevor the policeman,” PC Lock, aged 40, tells the journalists assembled at Scotland Yard. His familiar, East London accent rings out in the wintry afternoon.

Even though it is nine months since the siege at London’s Iranian Embassy in leafy South Kensington, the heroism of this thickset constable is fresh in the minds of British people. More so today after a judge, at the trial of the sole surviving Iranian-Arab terrorist, has praised PC Lock, formerly of the Diplomatic Protection Group, for his conduct. Over six tense days, he had been holed up with twenty-five other hostages and six heavily-armed members of a terrorist group, the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan.

“Before the siege, I used to be able to stop being a policeman and come back to a private world,” he says. Ironically, it was his homely style that saved the day for the petrified hostages.

At the beginning of the siege, as “Mr. British Policeman in full uniform,” Trevor was ordered to sit in the middle of the hostages on a big Queen Anne chair. Gradually, he became mediator, peacemaker, father-figure. Hostages and terrorists alike soon learned about Trevor that “if I was all right, they were all right.” A few fellow captives knew that Trevor still carried a loaded Smith and Wesson .38. After the hasty pat down by a nervous terrorist, Trevor had been left with the revolver inside his sweater.

He kept a jacket on for all six days.

Do I do the John Wayne bit and start blatting everyone in sight, he often asked himself? But he and the other hostages could end up dead. The Arab-Iranians carried grenades.

Trevor decided not to eat anything, or drink much water, so he wouldn’t have to go to the lavatory—a trip the hostages made under armed escort—in case the gun was revealed. He went without food for six days and did not wash. They probably think I’m a dirty British policeman, he told himself.

On the second evening of the siege, the terrorist leader Oan Ali Mohammed (code name “Salim”), a 27-year-old law student, summoned Trevor from his armchair to a wall in their first-floor room.

“Listen,” Oan told the policeman.

Trevor leaned forward. He could hear scratching noises.

At the Ethiopian Embassy next door, technicians were drilling holes in the wall—and embedding listening devices and fibre-optic cameras.

“Mice,” Trevor told Oan.

But word was out. COBRA, the British government’s crisis response committee (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A) ordered British Gas to create ambient noise by drilling in an adjacent road. In time, this noise agitated the gunmen. Instead, the British Airports Authority, owner of London’s Heathrow, was instructed to let approaching aircraft fly over the Iranian embassy at low altitude.

As the hours and minutes passed in ticking-time-bomb intimacy, Trevor made inroads with the captors. Who was guest, who was host, in this Iranian house in London? One of the terrorists called him “friend.” By the sixth day, it was clear that the gunmen were being stalled by British authorities who would not accede to their demands for a parley with Arab ambassadors—and safe passage out of the country. Tensions were running high.

Oan again summoned Trevor to the wall. There was now a sizeable bulge.

“Are the police going to storm in?”

Trevor shook his head. “It’s nothing.”

“They are up to something,” Oan said.

Trevor did not reply. He sensed that the terrorists would soon act on their threat to kill a hostage. The wall had distended because of bricks removed to plant the listening devices.

In his anxiety, Trevor requested a trip to the bathroom. Accompanied by one of the terrorists, he stood at a hand-basin. Trevor waited until the man left before he peeled off his coat in great haste. As he washed feverishly, the gunman returned. Trevor’s holster made a telltale lump in his sweater. He turned sideways to conceal the bulge. The terrorist stepped forward and offered him a tube of toothpaste.

Trevor bent forward to clean his teeth. The gunman left the room.

PC Lock ate the paste, the entire tube—and it was delicious.

“Why didn’t you shoot?” asks a reporter at Scotland Yard this February 5th afternoon, 1981. “During the security services’ rescue?”

“I do not think I could have had it on my conscience,” Trevor replies.

“What’s that, then, sir?”

“I do not believe in armed policemen, generally,” Trevor says.

The news teams gaze—and take their notes. “What’s it like being the nation’s sweetheart, Trevor?”

PC Lock seems embarrassed. If you look hard, you see guilt in the hero’s face. Yet another private world. In Trevor’s case that it was Oan, the 27-year-old leader, he could not save from a British bullet during Operation Nimrod, the rescue raid. Or the captors who had been persuaded, by the hostages, to surrender and had waved white flags. PC Lock was a dirty British policeman who made friends with the enemy as well as the hostages. He didn’t wash for six days straight.

If he was all right, they were all right?

“On underground trains, I get newspapers to autograph,” Trevor says. “In supermarkets, you see people nudging each other.”

My Darling

I can scream and weep at the same time. My body is alder, neck maple with a late ‘50s soft “V” profile. My name is Blackie. Eric cannot live without me; you probably know that. He played these strings eight years ago at this same venue—the Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park, north London. Tonight, we’re going strong: Eric Clapton and his Fender Stratocaster. We’re into ‘Worried Life Blues’ and it’s pouring out of us as he fingers my “Ernie Balls” strings and presses on the “Crybaby” wah-wah pedal:

Oh lordy lord, oh lordy lord.

It hurts me so bad for us to part.

But someday baby,

Iain’t gonna worry my life any more.

What you never quite forget about Eric, though, is that rant five years ago. It hangs over us, and every concert. As much as I try to love the man—and sing out, as I always do, those deepest parts within him—I hesitate, have sometimes doubted him, because of that 1976 gig up north in Birmingham:

“Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. Wogs, I mean, I’m looking at you. Where are you? I’m sorry but some fucking wog… Arab grabbed my wife’s bum, you know? … this is what all the fucking foreigners and wogs over here are like, just disgusting, that’s just the truth, yeah. So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country.”

For our song “Cocaine,” this February night in London, the audience is going nuts. Eric’s at my neck pickup. To reach the Clapton signature “woman tone,” he’s ramped up the volume to “full.” Tone to “0.” The muff-fuzz drives the crowd into a frenzy. We’ve set the Marshall amps at full tilt: bass, midrange, and treble on “10.” Our sound is high-voiced, tough, articulate if kind of thick, snarling. Eric flips the pickup selector to the bass-heavy first position. Then rolls off the two-tone pots. We’re hitting the sweet spot. Overdrive, distort. Eric’s wah-wah pedal left is entirely in the back heel position. His upturned mouth; my brown-sound.

“…I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man.”

We sail through the liquid chorus of ‘Worried Life Blues’ and into one of our standards, ‘Have You Ever Loved A Woman?’—with those many awkward key changes.

Have you ever loved a woman and you know you can’t leave her alone?

Something deep inside of you won’t let you wreck your best friend’s home.

I often wonder who the men and women are in Eric’s songs. Who they really are. Over the years I’ve put it together, within the riffing and scratching at our songs. His dad, Edward Fryer, was a married Canadian soldier stationed in England in 1945. Eric’s mum, Patricia, was sixteen years old. Until the age of nine, Eric was led to believe that his grandparents were his parents. Then he was told the truth: that his “sister” was his mother; and that his father, now back in Canada, had a family of his own there. Eric has spent his entire life wondering who his father is. He began strumming blues in his teens. That’s got to mean something. Riffs and rants, messages on their way.

Haveyoueverloveda woman so much you tremble in pain?

And all the time you know she bears another man’s name.

The highlight of our evening is another of Eric’s ballads. The sort of sweet tone he inherited from B.B. King and dramatized. My guy can make plain phrases flower, he avoids cut and thrust climaxes. It’s a sort of comfortable rock from the least showy of men. That’s how I see it. It’s weird that in one breath, he can sing about pure affection and then auction the rest off—me included—to the highest bidder, and launch into a rant like Birmingham. Is a riff only a riff, after all? Or something that’s always falling away; something to love, hate, and grab at? Something sent overseas, to heaven, or beyond the door? Something to set folks, and ourselves, ablaze?

And then I tell her, as I turn out the light,

I say, “My darling, you were wonderful tonight.”

After our concert, February 5th, 1981, many in the crowd thought the performance was too loud. They said we used The Who’s PA from the previous night. What the hell do audiences know? About Blackie, Eric, or anything?

Clapton is God, right. He knows he’s not always welcome. But would you recognize him in heaven? His down-weeping eye, the upturned mouth? Sure you would.

Worship that and eat your crisps, huh? We were fucking brilliant tonight.